Fellows in Residence

Dance

K.J. Holmes

Dance Artist, Vocalist, and Writer — United States

K.J. Holmes is a dance artist, actor, vocalist, writer, teacher who has collaborated with dancers Simone Forti, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton; poets Julie Carr, Edwin Torres; musicians Roy Campbell, Jr., Jeremy Carlstedt. She has produced at Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, NDA, PS 122, Roulette, Arts for Arts NYC and nationally/internationally; performed with Matthew Barney, Miguel Guiterrez, Karinne Keithley Seyers; and teaches at NYU/ETW, Movement Research. K.J. is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.

K.J. will be developing Blu/print, an improvised and structured dance/theater/music piece. Blu/print is a somatic search for origins—etymologies, physiologies, archeologies, geologies, musicologies—across time/space. She will be fine tuning a solo made with a distillation of texts created in residency at the Peripheral Center, Trumso Norway. The solo is an overture for an ensemble piece with three dancers and two musicians. She will also continue to deepen her research into the ensemble material.

Film/Video

Shuchi Talati

Filmmaker — India/United States

Shuchi Talati is a filmmaker from India whose work challenges dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, and South Asian identity. Her feature film, Girls Will Be Girls, won the John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award and also a couple awards at the an Audience Award and Special Jury Award at Sundance. Shuchi’s short film, A Period Piece, was selected for SXSW and her film Mae and Ash won numerous awards. She lives in NYC and is a graduate of the American Film Institute and an alum of Berlinale Talents.

FUTURE OF SEX is a screenplay-in-progress set in a remote utopian community where each member lives in symbiosis with a plant or animal—their symbiont. It’s difficult work with frequent losses. Climate grief, burnout, low desire and erotic dissatisfaction are widespread. So they decide to revive an idealistic sex-as-a-public-service program. They hope pleasure and connection will help people cope with grief. But the program creates emotional fractures that threaten the community’s very survival.

History

Justin Crumbaugh

Author and Chair of Spanish, Latina/o and Latin American Studies, Mount Holyoke College — United States

Justin Crumbaugh’s research explores expressions of right-wing extremism in contemporary Spain, from the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship to the rising reactionary nostalgia of recent years. His books include Destination Dictatorship (2009) and Spanish Fascist Writing (2021), and his articles have addressed topics such as the spectacle of tourist development, counter-terrorism discourse, and political architecture. His current book project traces the history of political victim enshrinement in contemporary Spain.

From the ubiquitous exaltation of the caídos or "fallen" fascists of the Spanish Civil War throughout the Franco dictatorship, to the victims of the armed Basque separatist organization ETA, to those claiming to be harmed by African migrants, successive spectacles of sacralized suffering have anchored reactionary thought and culture in Spain for nearly a century, whether under dictatorship or democracy. At the Bogliasco Center, Justin will be finishing a book manuscript on this topic.

Upcoming Fellows

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Architecture

Jennifer Newsom

Architect, Artist, and Professor of Architecture, Cornell University — United States

Jennifer Newsom is an architect, artist, and educator living and working in Ithaca, New York. Newsom’s installations examine how mechanisms of perception are inflected by memory, myth, and the architectural situation. She considers her built constructions in the context of social constructs, where bodies, images, and environments form loci of shifting meaning, often utilizing her work to mine the perceptual uncertainties at the boundary of what is actual and what is imagined. Her installations’ emphasis on ways of seeing and the agency of movement highlight the influence of those who encounter it; Newsom considers her work a platform for visceral experience and chance.

At Bogliasco, Newsom will cultivate a solo body of work — small-scale models, drawings, and texts — that bring the themes of her larger installations to more intimate registers. She will also continue work on a forthcoming publication reflecting on her practice and life. Combining essays, photography, drawing, and dialogic interludes to investigate themes of perception, representation, and embodiment, the project is an exploratory vehicle fusing many years of writing and making.

Classics

Danielle van Mal-Maeder

Researcher and Professor of Latin Language and Literature, University of Lausanne — Switzerland

Danielle van Mal-Maeder is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Lausanne. She has worked at the University of Groningen and benefited from residences at the Swiss Institute in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Her research focuses on the ancient novel and rhetoric. Director of a research center on ancient declamation, she collaborates on various international projects. From 2020 to 2026, she was subsequently Vice-Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Arts in Lausanne.

Her current research focuses on the Declamationes Minores, a collection of rhetorical exercises written in the 1st or 2nd century AD by a rhetor traditionally identified with the great Quintilian. This collection contains 145 declamations in Latin that have never been translated into French. The density and difficulty of this corpus also necessitate a commentary. This work is conducted in close collaboration with colleagues in France, Italy and Switzerland.

Dance

Hilary Brown-Istrefi

Choreographer, Performer, and Teaching Artist — Canada/United States

Hilary Brown-Istrefi is a Canadian-American choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Rockaway Beach, NY. Along with her twin sister Briana Brown-Tipley, she is the co-founder and director of Same As Sister (S.A.S.), an award-winning bi-national performance collective celebrating 13 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary storytelling. Their performance and film commissions have been presented and screened internationally in the US, Canada, Greece, Italy, and France.

Revealing the poignant intersections between twinship, blackness, mental illness, and art-making, Upstairs, In Our Bedroom is a multimedia dance performance that radically reimagines Same As Sister’s joint autobiography alongside that of the Barbadian-British outsider artists June-Alison and Jennifer Gibbons (‘The Silent Twins’). During her residency, Brown-Istrefi will research how different means of reenactment can be devised to perform this complex entanglement of identities.